The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter Page B

it, binding, paper, type and all. His Uncle Dick had sent it North when a conductor on Flagler’s railroad that was then just reaching south of Jacksonville. His Uncle Dick had been there when most of the state was a jungle. He hadn’t stayed long, but long enough to send up the first grapefruit ever seen in Unionville. Nobody had liked it.
    “I wonder,” the old stranger begged, “if you would let me go through the house.”
    His uncle’s expression did not change, as if the request was beneath considering.
    “We’d bring the old harridan out on us,” he refused briefly.
    “I once lived here and should like very much to see it again!” John Donner begged.
    “Nobody ever lived here except the old lady and us,” Uncle Dick informed him.
    “It was on the other side. When I was a boy.”
    “Well, I couldn’t show you the other side,” Uncle Dicksaid flatly. “The Houcks live there.” He considered him with a skeptical eye. “You say you lived over there when you were a boy. I judge the old harridan isn’t more than fifteen or twenty years older than you. She claims she built this house when she was forty. So when you were a boy there was no house here at all.”
    “It was in another life and world,” John Donner explained.
    At the look his uncle gave him, he knew it was the wrong tack. He better not get himself in deeper. He sat very still, tasting while he could the invisible emanation pouring from the old honeycomb of a house. That door with the heavy wrought-iron lock, they said, had originally opened to steps in the yard. Now it led to the bare schoolroom where Aunt Teresa had taught her kindergarten, usually with an apple on the Baltimore heater to “purify” the air, and a pair of stools up in front of her desk so she could question two pupils at a time. Under the schoolroom was the dim outer basement, with Uncle Dick’s blue bicycle in a corner, with crocks on the shelves and bare hard earth underfoot except for the brick walk to the door. Under where he sat now was the basement kitchen with its two red cupboards, the stairs coming down, the low bridge of a whitewashed rafter, and the windowslifted back in summer on long wire catches. Here you looked out level with the ground outside, an experience that as a boy turned him into a creature no higher than a cricket, intimate with grass and grasshoppers. The other door led to the cellar, musty with the smell of spoiling potatoes, earth and coal, of a hanging safe and of a red bread tray on saw-horses.
    Emotions were fast crowding now. What had happened in this cellar, he never knew. There was talk that his Great-Grandfather Scarlett had once murdered a peddler in his Mansion House cellar uptown. John Donner’s mother and Aunt Jess had ridiculed the story, but as a boy sent for coal at Aunt Jess’s he knew terror till he was back with the throated bucket from the Nameless Dark to the warm secure kitchen, with the octagonal steel kettle simmering on the stove, and his mother and Aunt Jess telling stories over the red cloth.
    He heard a movement and looked up. Uncle Dick had got formally to his feet and stood there waiting with Northern Irish dourness. It came to him with a little shock that the man had had enough of him and wanted him to go. He wanted to get him out before Aunt Jess returned. He wanted to get back to his paper, Uncle Dick who had once been his friend,had looked up to the young writer, tramped the hills with him while he talked of the West and the stubbornness of these Pennsylvania Dutch farmers sticking to their stony hills when they could homestead the rich level soil of the West.
    The stranger got up reluctantly. He felt abandoned and confused.
    “If the young could only know,” he apologized for his uncertainty. “But then they wouldn’t be young any more.”
    There was no reply. He feasted his eyes for the last time on the Scarlett sofa, on the cubbyhole doors, on the yellow buffet that Aunt Jess used for papers and such, on